Peter O'Toole and What He Ate on Film: In Memoriam

This was the film that made O'Toole a star, and the film with which he's still most closely associated. It being a historical desert war epic, there isn't much chance for dwelling on feasts, but vast tracts of sand do have a way of focusing the mind on getting something to drink. Water, and the lack thereof, leads to the death of more than one man in the movie, and the scene where Lawrence, along with a Bedouin boy with whom he's just wandered across the Sinai peninsula without a compass, enters the officer's club at the British headquarters in Cairo filthy and in full Bedouin dress. His fellow officers, busy playing snooker while he organizes and helps to revolutionize the Middle East, are aghast at his appearance, and demand he leave. But he walks to the bar, grabs the bartender, and demands something very simple: two lemonades.

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Food in the movies is one of our favorite things here at Bon Appétit (if it looks great in our little magazine, why not 30 feet tall?), so when one of the century’s great actors shuffles off this mortal coil, we like to take a look back at what they contributed to the subgenre of Edible (and Potable) Cinema.

Peter O’Toole, who died Saturday, had a deserved reputation as one of the hell-raisingest drunks of the screen and stage. He was infamous for stepping out to any nearby pub during intermissions when working in the theater, or any time at all when working on film, and getting down as much scotch as humanly possible before he had to be back in front of an audience, often in the company of fellow (and late) dramatic drinkers like Richards Burton and Richard Harris.

But it was his latter-day role as the voice of Anton Ego, the cold, solitary, and cruel Parisian restaurant critic in 2007′s Ratatouille, that launched him into the pantheon of Great Food Actors. No other film, or at least no other film in our cinematic recipe box, contains an entire restaurant review delivered with the emotion and depth of a Shakespearean monologue (of which O’Toole had delivered many in his day, twice as Hamlet).

O’Toole didn’t play any other roles so focused on food in his long career, but he did, from time to time, eat (and more often drink) on-screen. Click through our slideshow to see O’Toole’s other most memorable food scenes, and go ahead and watch some of the movies in full, if you’ve got the time.

This was the film that made O'Toole a star, and the film with which he's still most closely associated. It being a historical desert war epic, there isn't much chance for dwelling on feasts, but vast tracts of sand do have a way of focusing the mind on getting something to drink. Water, and the lack thereof, leads to the death of more than one man in the movie, and the scene where Lawrence, along with a Bedouin boy with whom he's just wandered across the Sinai peninsula without a compass, enters the officer's club at the British headquarters in Cairo filthy and in full Bedouin dress. His fellow officers, busy playing snooker while he organizes and helps to revolutionize the Middle East, are aghast at his appearance, and demand he leave. But he walks to the bar, grabs the bartender, and demands something very simple: two lemonades.